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This study aimed at exploring the influence of the role that a teacher employs on his/her professional success. The teacher role was investigated from a new outlook, Goffman's footing theory. According to Goffman (1981), a speaker's role can be classified into three categories of animator, author, and principal, characterized as the repeater of the ideas made by the others, the paraphraser of concepts, and the creator of original ideas, respectively. Applying this theory in the educational context, the researchers selected 36 university professors of TEFL in the MA level and asked their students (N=118) to identify their professors' dominant role as animator, author, or principal, both generally and individually, via a metaphor checklist and their professional success via the Characteristic of Successful Iranian EFL Teacher Questionnaire. The results of Chi-square analysis indicated that the professors dominantly take on the author and animator roles respectively. One-way Anova results also demonstrated that the professors taking on the principal role enjoy higher professional success than those adopting the animator and author roles. The results offer implications and suggestions for pedagogical consideration within the Iranian university context.

Hooshang Golshiri’s Shazdeh Ehtejab, as a very influential novel in the Iranian history of novel writing, has drawn attentions from plethora of critics with different approaches and attitudes. The present article draws on the ideas and concepts introduced by deconstructive theoreticians to investigate the nuances and delicate contradictions the novel offers about the nature of power relations. The article mainly centers around the opposition between the binary of author/reader, how it is reversed or subverted in the novel, and the way it is extended to the novels’ involvement with power relations which may be representative of the general social and power structure of particular historical era in Iran. To avoid the major critique against deconstruction's abstract armchair theorizing, the present article would also draw upon some of the well-known ideas and concepts used by famous writers in power relation namely Louis Althusser and Foucault to move the analysis beyond the text to the social sphere.